Searching for Starlight
by SydneyLouWho
Summary: Johanna had always loved the stars.


**Written for the Caesar's Palace _What Goes Around Comes Around_ challenge. The challenge was to begin and end the story with the exact same sentence.**

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><p><em>"Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you."<em>

-Aberjhani

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><p>Johanna had always loved the stars.<p>

In the summers of her youth, her father would often take her down to the big hill in their district at night. They'd sit in the soft grass and look up at the sky. She'd always remember how those nights smelled, the sweet smells of grass and dirt and flowers as they were squished beneath her bare little feet.

Her father would tell her the names of the stars and would tell stories, of the heroes who fought valiantly and earned a place in the stars, ancient legends that were forgotten by most.

Johanna had always been intrigued by the stories; she secretly hoped that someday she could be a hero and that her epic story could be etched in the night sky forever.

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><p>The stars disappeared in the Capitol.<p>

She looked up to find them on her first night there, just a seventeen-year-old kid, scared and lonely. Looking at the stars would give her just a shred of normalcy, a glimmer of hope that everything would be okay, but the stars weren't there. The lights of the Capitol, illuminating the streets as the parties raged on outside, drowned out her only connection to her family, to her district, to hope.

She wondered if her father was looking at the stars, wondering if she could see them too.

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><p>The stars reappeared on her first night in the arena. Brighter than most stars, their ethereal glow illuminating her face and the face of the boy with an axe lodged between his shoulder blades. She took the appearance of the stars as a sign that what she was doing was necessary, that it wasn't a crime to play the games as they were meant to be played.<p>

_They want me to be selfish, right? That's what will keep me alive._

And it did keep her alive, but she could feel a tearing somewhere deep within her, possibly a tearing of her conscience, or of her soul. She was a monster.

Later on she would discover that she stars she'd seen in the arena were just as Capitol-produced as the demons that lived within her.

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><p><em>The lights, the glitter, the ballgowns swishing past in swirls of color.<em> All were telltale signs of a Capitol gala, but this time the party was for Johanna, and she had never felt more alone, even surrounded by a thousand smiling faces. Two thousand glittering eyes looked her way as she arrived, all clouded by an alcohol-induced euphoria, but she wanted them to look away, to look anywhere else but at her. They were celebrating the monsters inside of her, the ones that caused her to kill innocent children, some even younger than she was.

She didn't dare look up at the sky, because she already knew what she wouldn't see. The stars that would've been in the night sky were in the eyes of the partygoers instead.

As she stood near the edge of the dance floor, sipping the gilt-colored liquid in her glass, the men began to swarm towards her, like wasps. They would touch her legs, tugging at the hemline of the short dress she wore. She'd tell them to stop, but they'd only laugh, their mouths, reeking of alcohol, dangerously near her face. One touched her ass, and another her breast. She desperately wanted to fight, but there were too many of them and too much alcohol swirling through her veins. Johanna had never been drunk and the room seemed to swirl around her.

President Snow watched from his perch above the crowd, a sick smile curling his lips.

He called her away from the party, for which she was grateful, and equally frightened. "I see how desirable you've become after becoming a victor," he said, before explaining his grand plan for her life.

She thought of the men at the party, uninhibited in their violation of her young body; they were disgusting and clearly not well-intentioned. She had sold her soul, but she would not sell her body.

'No' was the word that broke her world apart.

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><p>She returned home to ashes and dust, a simmering shell of her old life and the burning remains of her family. They said it was an accident, a fallen candle or a stove left on and they had all been taken in their sleep, in the middle of a dream. It was a tragedy, but purely accidental.<p>

This was the official story, but the gasoline soaked rose, burnt at the edges and identical to the ones that adorned the interior of the Presidential mansion, told a different tale.

Johanna looked at the sky for any sign that it was all made-up, or an elaborate nightmare, but the thick blanket of smoke in the air concealed even the smallest glimpses of the starry night.

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><p>She found hope again in the Girl on Fire; the girl herself was a star, though a very annoying one, and for the first time since she was seventeen, she felt as though maybe, just maybe, there was a way for President Snow to pay for all that he'd taken from her. It was a long shot, but she got the feeling that joining Katniss' team would turn things around, that the stupid, annoying girl could become a powerful enough figure to take down the Capitol.<p>

And Johanna wanted to be there when the Capitol was in flames.

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><p>Watching Katniss shoot her arrow at the forcefield, Johanna smiled. Lightning struck and the world was consumed in a flash of light, shaking the earth and knocking her to the ground.<p>

She had accepted her impending death; she had gotten too far away from Katniss, the one they really needed to remove from the arena in one piece and still alive. The spark had erupted into flame, though, and she knew that changes were coming; her death was just a small price to pay if the Capitol was going to be destroyed. She wondered if her sacrifice would be drawn into the night sky with a constellation that only few could recognize. She doubted it.

Everything was bursting into flames of white and orange around her, the explosions blooming in her eyes like stars swelling and bursting somewhere far away in the universe, white hot and beautiful.

Johanna had always loved the stars.


End file.
